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Think on the meta level just a bit. As in, not about whether these twenty people themselves were or were not intentionally trying to commit a crime, and catching them is proof of anything.
From a pure signalling standpoint, if you want to prevent people from knowingly casting illegal votes and demonstrate that you are capable of enforcing this rule (i.e. detecting illegal votes), then yes, you have to arrest people who do cast illegal votes, even if they possess a defense for the action.
Especially since "I was told it was legal to cast my vote" is such an easy defense to invoke and hard to disprove otherwise. You show that you will STILL investigate such situations and try to verify the defense as valid.
Do you think that this action will, on the margins, increase or decrease the chances of someone attempting actual voter fraud in the 2022 elections in Florida?
Or would the effect be entirely minimal and worth disregarding?
The answer isn't obvious. These actions will absolutely discourage anyone with a felony conviction from trying to vote, even if they are legally permitted to, because who wants to risk getting arrested years down the line over something as individually trivial as voting? Felony disenfranchisement currently affects almost a million people in Florida, almost 10% of the adult population, so it's bound to have a significant effect.
In contrast, actual voting fraud is extremely rare. Just for perspective, 19 foreign nationals were charged for illegally voting in North Carolina in 2020. To me, it's not obvious how many of those foreign nationals were acting with malicious intent, or whether they made an honest mistake. Jeopardizing one's immigration status to cast one vote seems like an idiotic gamble. Beyond that, the scenarios where voter fraud is clearly motivated by malicious intent are too sporadic to get a comprehensive accounting for. I'm aware of very few cases, like for example this Nevada man who used his dead wife's ballot to cast a vote.
I suppose you can defend the heavy-handedness if your overriding priority is primarily to tamp down on the handful of actual voter fraud that takes place. But if so, I would like to at least see an earnest attempt to address the collateral damage. Is dissuading a handful of bad actors worth putting some innocent people in jail? Worth dissuading large swathes of the population from legally voting? If so, say so.
Actual voting fraud convictions are extremely rare. Actual voting fraud is unknown as the Republican party was unable to perform any investigation into it for 30+ years.
What does this even mean? Are you assuming that voter fraud is only/primarily committed by Democrats? Because why would it be the Republican party's responsibility? And why/how were they "unable" to investigate the issue? What was law enforcement doing this whole time?
I believe that he’s referring to this. Per the article: “After more than three decades, Republicans are free of a federal court consent decree that sharply limited the Republican National Committee’s ability to challenge voters’ qualifications and target the kind of fraud President Donald Trump has alleged affected the 2016 presidential race.”
Presumably, republican organizations that aren't the "RNC" would be able to do that? And there are a ton of those.
Or you know, law enforcement. I'm guessing the counter-argument is that the consent decree that the RNC voluntarily agreed to had such a profound chilling effect that it spooked the RNC and their allies from even raising the issue, even after the decree expired in 2018.
The RNC of 30 years prior, you mean? And aren’t consent decrees settlements to lawsuits? Seems pretty disingenuous to call it “voluntary” when the nigh-certain alternative was an even worse court-imposed judgment.
Yeah, surely the prior three decades of forced atrophy had no effect on their ability to effectively discover and root out such things. Two years should be more than enough to get them up to speed! Not to mention that they obviously extensively raised the issue in 2020, their next earliest opportunity, much to your oft-voiced chagrin.
Why do you think the prospect of a worse court-imposed judgment was nigh-certain? Do you believe it's disingenuous to label voluntary any lawsuit settlement? I'm assuming the RNC is not a mom & pop business whose legs start shaking at the sight of a legal document. They had the resources to litigate the allegations and chose not to, I'm assuming because the chances they had a meritorious defense was dim.
Right, we're back in familiar unfalsifiable country. If the RNC lose on an issue it's not because it wasn't meritorious but rather because the RNC is perpetually helpless and unable to defend its interests against an onslaught of relentless attacks. These types of excuses can be self-soothing as a coping mechanism, but they're not very persuasive to other people.
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